Whatever Happened to Final Fantasy?

Retrovolve: "I love world-spanning, epic stories as much as the next geek. I want to fall in love with characters, enjoy and appreciate their backgrounds, and feel their triumph right along with them. At the same time, Final Fantasy games are just that: games. They may be games designed to tell a story, but it’s a story that I’m supposed to play through. They ask me not to simply watch he characters progress through a story, but step into the role of those characters and experience their adventures through their eyes.

Modern Final Fantasy games, by and large, seem to want to tell the story they plan on telling, and f*ck any player input."

It's simple, Squaresoft made the great FF's. One day, they merged with Enix, many things changed and since then Final Fantasy went downhill. I don't know what exactly happened there but my guess is that Square was restructured and "westernized" by Enix.

Not at all. That was the point of XIII and it's lack of exploration. Accordingly to it's own producer's, they wanted to lure shooter's fans to the series.

Lightning Returns also got rid of parties and added a clock to finish the game, implementing an even faster paced combat to a trilogy that already had fast paced combat instead of the slow combat of older games... how is that being more japanese? The creators themselves said they were inspired by CoD of all games!

Wow, that's odd. I agree that something bad happened to Final fantasy over the years but I have a completely different take on it.

The author seems to be saying that Final fantasy was ruined by it's increasing desire to tell a powerful and intricate story while sacrificing player input rather than keeping story to a minimum and just letting us get on with the fun monster slaying. My opinion is that they've sacrificed the powerful and moving story for the sake of shallow blockbuster razzle dazzle and more accessible gameplay.

To be honest I don't like turn based tactical combat, I don't like having to keep my party dressed in the highest rated gear with the best weapons and just enough potions and yet Final fantasy 6 is probably in my top 3 games of all time. Maybe I shouldn't say I don't like all that stuff but I certainly don't enjoy it by itself, it's certainly not THE big draw for me to any turn based RPG.

What draws me to a game like FF6 is the beautiful, intricate story. The gear and combat systems, while not fun by themselves for me really help making you feel like you're earning the next chapter in the story. I want to fight through the next battle just to see what happens next to these characters I've grown to love. A game like Final fantasy 6 feels like getting comfy in a warm bed on a cold rainy night, opening a big dusty old book and getting lost in the magical, romantic world it drags you into (this isn't just nostalgia talking either as I didn't even play the game until about 3 years ago). The more recent Final fantasy games feel like going to the cinema to see the latest big budget soulless 3d blockbuster and watching the cast of Highschool musical strut around way too busy cgi sets firing lasers and spouting awful one liners.

What happened to Final Fantasy was that nothing "happened" to it. The reasons for the series' collapse following the Square-Enix merger are many. There is no single, defining aspect we can point to and say, "That's what did it."

So, why did Final Fantasy go from one of the most esteemed franchises in gaming to one of the most embarrassing?

In short: Final Fantasy became a victim of its own success. Or: It was FFX's fault.

Here's the thing about Final Fantasy: with FFVII, and then FFVIII and FFIX, Squaresoft managed to acrue a reputation for having cutting-edge visuals in their games. With the generational leap to the Playstation 2, Squaresoft suddenly found that they had a lot more hardware to take advantage of--and it maintain that reputation for visual excellence they would need to spend a lot of time, effort and money making Final Fantasy X as visually impressive and polished as possible.

The problem being, as we've seen with the past two generational leaps, that a big increase in technical potential necessitates and equally large increase in development staff. Simply put, Squaresoft spent too much money making FFX look pretty, and soon discovered that it could not compete at the PS2 level on its own.

(Fun fact: ever wonder what happened to the hegemony of Japanese-developed games during the transition from the PS2 to PS3 era? The exact same thing. In the West, developers managed to stay afloat by embracing giant publishers; most Japanese developers simply jumped ship and started developing handheld (and later mobile) games instead.)

Anyway, Squaresoft found itself in a financial rut and chose to escape it by becoming a giant publisher themselves. Unfortunately, instead of recognizing the inevitable problems of fixating on visual prowess as the benchmark for the Final Fantasy series, and scaling back development, they chose to solve the problem by throwing even MORE money and resources at the Final Fantasy games. Which is why FFXII, FFXIII and FFXV have all required more and more time and money to develop.

And Square-Enix still has yet to realize that this is a game they cannot win.

The problem, if there is just one problem, is that Square-Enix wanted to focus on a specific aspects that "defined" the franchise. They chose visuals, crystals, and airships. That was the wrong move.